Working with the web & the future

Sally Jenkinson @sjenkinson . sally@recordssoundthesame.com

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@sjenkinson

The internet of 2021

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youtube.com/watch?v=8p0jmewhXeU @sjenkinson

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What challenges does the future bring?

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What we plan now may not be relevant in the

future

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Our project

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Our users

Our business

Technology

Wildcards

Our project

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Disruption will only accelerate

Our existing standards, workflows and infrastructure won’t hold up

Proprietary solutions will dominate at first

The standards process will be painfully slow.

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Our choices can become white elephants

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Klagenfurt_Viktring_Quellenstrasse_Strom-Verbundnetz_13022010_1580.jpg

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Keeping up vs getting ahead

“It’s all broken!”

“We have to throw it out and

start again!”

“…be guaranteed to meet the business

and customer needs for the next 5-10 years at least…”

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Keeping up as individuals

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The future is hard!

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The future, from the past

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“Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. !

This is where things get tricky.”

teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop

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Telling stories can give human context to

technology

flickr.com/photos/randar/16862053922 @sjenkinson

goo.gl/8IKgEd @sjenkinson

flickr.com/photos/foam/9248390752/ @sjenkinson

“a work kit useful for parceling ideas into their

atomic elements”

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Interactions and interfaces

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“We’ve seen repeatedly that if an interface works for an audience, there’s something there

that will work for users. !

Finding what that thing is and using it for inspiration in our own work is part of how we can

use these speculative interfaces.”

Make It So (scifiinterfaces.com)

flickr.com/photos/blile59/3547072689 @sjenkinson

flickr.com/photos/frinky/2288705567/ @sjenkinson

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Using future thinking

1. Better consider our users’ changing needs.

2. Identify opportunities.

3. Aid prioritisation.

4. Define what something is and what it will be.

5. More robust decisions - understand limitations and benefits of choices.

6. React quickly/better to change by embracing evolution.

7. Make more exciting things and shape the future of the web!

Future benefits

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The future & our work

flickr.com/photos/oflittleinterest/8171299893/ @sjenkinson

Half-life

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User interfaces & interactions

Features

Digital platform components (CMS, etc)

‘Non-digital’ systems (accountancy, etc)

Browsers

Hosting environment & languages

Third party integrations

Deployment tools

Different elements have different half-lives

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Choose technologies and architect your developments

with half-lives in mind

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Separate concerns, loosely couple

Think in patterns, not pages

Modular CSS

Enhance!

“Zero UI is … taking us away from screens to a more natural way of interacting with things”

Andy Goodman @goodmania

Submit

doStuff()

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A practical approach to the future

Discovery & planningWork content

first Separate content from display to better cater for new outputs (visual

or otherwise)

Where screens are involved, remember to think from very small to very large

Prioritise your requirements

Create a backlog and strategic

roadmap & make these visible

Balance problems now & of the future

Consider future usage patterns, interactions, and

behaviour

Embrace wider trends (remote

teams etc)

Learn from the

past

Don’t be bound by

form

Create a set of high level principles for

the future

Make no assumptions about usage

Stories and design

thinking (workshops)

Example principles

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Frederik Pohl

flickr.com/photos/s-t-r-a-n-g-e/8292748067

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam”

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Embrace web standards, semantics,

open formats

Progressive enhancement

Create incrementally, release often

Track & manage change

Think atomically

Allocate time to improve the past and

the future Lifespan of project components

Separation, modularity,

loosely-coupled architectures and

services

Embrace automation Document decisions (not heavily, but ensure the past is captured for future

learning)

Prototype & test

Doing

Responsive design

Leave space for the future

Draw a line - what do you support? Why?

Share your experiences

Specs & upcoming

technologies

Measure, & use your data

Better digital preservation

Play moreTake inspiration from the world

(watch more sci-fi!)

Evolving

Accept change. It doesn’t mean you

failed

Work to educate others, to facilitate

improvements

Fix problems that you can see, and

those that might beProvide support (bleeding edge technology

users often have it rough)

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Cup of tea?

flickr.com/photos/stevensnodgrass/4011568197 @sjenkinson

“Don’t plan for the future because there is no future - just now and a series of next nows.”

Jon Gold @jongold

@sjenkinson sally@recordssoundthesame.com

recordssoundthesame.com

Thank you!

My slides are mainly blue because according to Make It So, blue is ‘futuristic’ - it’s the most prevalent colour in sci-fi interfaces

flaticon.com/packs/color-startups-and-new-business